Director Peter Jackson is now a household name, deservedly mentioned in the same breath as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. His latest undertaking, an adaptation of Alice Sebold’s critically acclaimed novel The Lovely Bones, showcases his adventurous side, diving (recklessly) into a psychologically complicated and emotionally deep story, and one already with a large and dedicated fan base. The man should probably stick to hobbits and aliens; the bottom line is that his rendering of The Lovely Bones is simultaneously sappy and without substance.

The Lovely Bones, set in a small town in Pennsylvania during the 70s, is the story of a girl, Suzie Salmon (Saorise Ronan), murdered by a deranged pervert during her walk home from school, yet remains on Earth to look over and guide her family to her killer. The plot is told through Suzie’s all-seeing mind, looking out both onto her family while wandering throughout the space between life and afterlife.

While Ronan is appropriately girly as Suzie and Stanley Tucci is exceptionally creepy as the psychotic Mr. Harvey, the rest of the cast seemed uninspired. Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz, playing Suzie’s worried parents Jack and Abigail, may have been better at getting people into the theatre, rather than pleasing them once they sit down.

Easily the most important technique that Sebold employed in her book was keeping Suzie present in the story, as a pseudo-guardian angel. We follow Suzie as she ventures into a fantastical world of her past, giant ships-in-bottles crash into cliffs, a colossal light house drifts its light in front of her, both allusions to a ship-building hobby she shared with her father. This may be Jackson’s intended tour de force, a digitally beautiful world where anything is possible, where Suzie can trounce about, perfectly content.

Unfortunately, the introduction of the dream world is where the movie starts to fall apart. Jackson unsuccessfully darts back and forth between the real world, wherein Suzie’s emotions seem to influence her father’s will to search for the murderer, and “the in-between,” where Suzie plays around, slowly finding her path to heaven. Jackson and his writers fail to grasp the importance of each distinct world. In the real world, Suzie should be causing rifts in her family, by goading her father to neglect his family in lieu of his search for the killer, but those rifts never really take center stage. Thus, when Abigail leaves spontaneously for California, we are caught by surprise, unarmed.

Over in the dream world, Jackson also fails to make the scenes meaningful. Symbols like the ships-in-bottles merely represent Suzie’s childhood, and serve no deeper function. Together, the two halves of the movie neither connect nor can they stand by themselves.